


Premonition

by Fudgyokra



Category: Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, But Hey I'm Sure It'll All Work Out, Fist Fights, Friends to Enemies, Friendship/Love, Hurt No Comfort, Identity Issues, Implied Sexual Content, Lost Love, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Past Relationship(s), Psychological Trauma, Rebirth, Sad Ending, Soooort of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 11:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11920053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: He was completely undressed, smiling at him like a cat that had caught the canary. Bruce, incogitant, could not seem to avert his gaze from skin so pale, from eyes so green. “See something you like?” John teased, cocking his head knowingly.





	Premonition

**Author's Note:**

> Tried my hand at some Telltale BatJokes. Takes place in a nebulous space between the first and second games with a couple things changed (and a nod to The Dark Knight included), but knowing the plots to any of those aren’t a requisite to reading this, anyway.
> 
> While I Wrote:
> 
> Creep – Stone Temple Pilots  
> Teddy Bear – Melanie Martinez*  
> Deify – Disturbed  
> Novocaine – Fall Out Boy  
> Courtesy Call – Thousand Foot Krutch  
> Cut the Cord – Shinedown  
> Hemorrhage – Fuel
> 
> And others that don’t matter as much, as usual!

_Everything was so sweet,_

_Until you tried to kill me._

* * *

 

Bruce Wayne remembered life in patches these days. It was a little hard to keep things straight when the last few tumultuous years of his life were spent either in abject misery or in a drug-induced haze of anger (not of his own volition) inside the intimidating gray walls of Arkham Asylum.

Despite the lapses in memory and in willingness to care about what he should have remembered, something that Bruce could say was a positive in his life was the odd but stirring attachment he had to one peculiar patient named John Doe. Things between them were tense at first, if only because Bruce did not consider himself in the business of making friends at Arkham. As it were, he might never have at all, if it weren’t for John’s inescapable interest.

The man did not have any sense of boundaries, if his intimate touches and personal probing were anything to go by. Bruce later learned that this was not particular to just himself; John was touchy-feely with everyone, either unaware of their discomfort or blatantly disregarding. Something that _was_ just between them, though, were the nighttime activities into which Bruce had accidentally ushered them. It began with one wrong glance at the wrong time: in the middle of changing. Bruce had backed up a step too far as he wrangled his asylum-issued pajamas on, bumping John’s back with his own. He didn’t know whether or not he’d meant to do it—his memory, oddly enough, failed him on this point—but he turned around to look at him, catching the man’s heady gaze dead-on.

He was completely undressed, smiling at him like a cat that had caught the canary. Bruce, incogitant, could not seem to avert his gaze from skin so pale, from eyes so green.

“See something you like?” John teased, cocking his head knowingly.

Bruce did not realize his mouth had opened until John reached out with one finger to push up on his chin. “Woah, never made a guy speechless quite like that before.”

“I’m—I’m sorry.” Bruce shook his head to clear it, but by then the blood was already in the water. He wasn’t sure when John’s hands, cold and thin, had flattened against his chest, or when he’d reached out to take the other man by the hips, feeling bone under his palms that advertised a kind of fragility he knew John did not have.

To this day, he was not sure if he was thinking clearly or not during that tryst, which had become the first of many to grace his body in the pressing darkness of nightfall. The habits they’d formed went far beyond the bounds of friendship.

John was knowledgeable about these sorts of things in a way that Bruce was loath to admit he hadn’t expected of him. Throughout the weeks they spent together in that cell, John was perfectly content to show Bruce _just_ what he knew, and how well he knew it. It had become oddly endearing, the way he’d make each move like he were playing a chess match; he’d always reach out tentatively, look at Bruce with those electric green eyes, and ask him if it was all right for him to—just to see if he’d like it—of course he could always say no—he wouldn’t want to pressure him like that— Bruce had gotten curiously comfortable with the man in this time.

When Bruce finally checked out of Arkham, John seemed quite certain they would meet again someday. Someday, someday, someday, he’d said, like it was a fortune destined to come true.

It had been a year since then.

Tonight, Bruce sat crouched on a rooftop, a speck in the Gotham night sky made to blend right in. He’d forgotten a lot of things over the years, but that alley and his mother’s pearls, the twin gunshots that had changed his life forever…those were not among them. That was what ultimately drove him to do what he did now, surveying his city beneath black boots and a haze of crime and pollution.

The ruckus began early tonight, as the squealing alarms of the West End Bank pierced through the otherwise calming sounds of the cityscape. Larson wasn’t a rare crime in Gotham, but when the Batman arrived on the scene, it was clear to him within seconds that something was far more wrong than usual. GCPD had pulled their numbers in close, crowding the front of the building with blinking car lights and cocked pistols.

“Batman!” Gordon called from among the suits. He shouldered his way through his colleagues and approached Bruce with his walkie held aloft. “Glad you’re here. We got a real strange problem. And I mean _strange_.”

Bruce glanced up at the building, which had begun smoking, to everyone’s alarm. Past commanding cries of contacting the fire department, mingled with the screams and tittering of the public, Gordon was telling him something about a man in a clown mask. “It’s downright crazy, is what it is!” he finished, pausing to put the walkie to his mouth and bark orders into it before affixing Bruce with a hard stare. “We have no idea how he got in or even what he wants. He tripped those alarms on _purpose,_ Batman. Said he wanted an _audience_.” The man had begun to gesticulate wildly, so Bruce held up a hand in assurance.

“Whatever it is, I’ll handle it,” he grumbled. His next words were drowned out by a massive bang, orchestrated by the madman himself crashing a hideously-defaced van through the bank’s wall. The vehicle screeched out onto the street, and the police were quick to load into their cars and follow suit.

Bruce narrowed his eyes and caught Gordon by the shoulder. “That wasn’t him,” he said, raking his gaze across the bank’s rooftop. When Gordon followed his stare and caught onto the moving figure Bruce was identifying, he lifted the walkie again, only for it to be covered with one of the Bat’s gloved hands. “Save it. Let me see what all the fuss is about. You work on getting civilians out of the way.”

“Are you—” Gordon sighed hard through his nose and took a step back. “Okay, go. I got it.”

With the commissioner out of mind, Bruce grappled his way to the rooftop and braced himself. Whoever this new threat was, he had a knack for flair. The smoke in the building wasn’t from fire, but from smoke bombs—something Bruce realized only in proximity to the building. It smelled of sulfur and, up close, he could see that the smoke was not gray but powder blue.

His ears perked at the sound of somebody cackling. The voice was not only chilling but horribly, horribly familiar.

“I knew I’d get your attention eventually, Batman!” the criminal cried jubilantly. _So, he’d been expected, then._

“What do you want with me?” Bruce asked, taking a small, sliding step forward to hunt through the shadows for the man.

“To have a little _fun!_ ” Out of nowhere, a human-sized weight slammed into his chest, knocking him onto his back and sending the batarang he’d loaded into his palm skittering across the concrete several feet away from them. There was a hand gripping the exposed part of his face now, blunt nails digging crescents into his cheeks. He had begun to say something, but Bruce was too busy having his reality shaken, hard, when the perpetrator removed his mask.

The jarring blow that the man’s fist made to Bruce’s face was nothing compared to the rattling already going on in his head as he looked up into green eyes, manic, glittering, beautiful. Not a stranger’s eyes, nor a stranger’s voice. Bruce wasn’t sure what he’d gotten himself into tonight.

“My, you’re a cute one,” John was saying, angling Bruce’s face upward to examine the shiny new bruise he’d just inflicted upon it. “But that ain’t gonna get you far from your just-desserts!” He was rearing back to strike again when Bruce caught his wrist with crushing force, turning John’s smile into a ruby frown.

It _was_ him. Beneath the wild hair, the lipstick, the ridiculous purple suit, it was John Doe. Bruce almost made the mistake of saying his name aloud. Instead, he broke himself out of his reverie and slammed the man onto his side.

The fight became a grappling match on the ground, all violent jabs and knuckle against bone. So different from their last touches, not that John had a clue.

Bruce had him pinned with his fist raised when it happened: John smiled, wide and wicked, and didn’t move a muscle. “I know when I’ve been beat, but listen, _Bat_ man,” he hissed the name like a slur, something dirty and disgraceful, and the fervor with which he spoke it temporarily turned his grin into a snarl. “I’ll just keep coming back, like a cockroach. You don’t know it yet, but I’m gonna be the guy that _kills_ you.”

Bruce couldn’t bring himself to hit him another time. He lowered his hand, staring down at the other with somber focus. “Why?” was all he could manage to make his numb mouth say.

“ _Why!_ ” John barked a laugh, right in Bruce’s face. “Because you’re…” Whatever he’d been about to say was taken by the wind, as his malice faded into something reminiscent. Bruce felt a stab of panic in his chest; he couldn’t recognize him, could he? There’d be no way.

John swallowed hard all of the sudden, and the way his eyes went dull triggered something powerful within the Batman. It was a look he recognized all too well: The glazed-over expression of catatonia, of a man whose mind was likely too broken to ever fix.

Alarmed and remorseful, Bruce stood and lifted the man into his arms, ignoring the sudden cry he gave in response and only narrowly dodging the swipe he made at his face. “What! Are! You! Doing!” John all but screeched, forcing himself back onto his own legs and pounding his curled fists into Bruce’s armored chest. It definitely hurt John more than it hurt him, but holding his spasming body back was becoming both emotionally stressful and physically difficult. So, without another path in mind, he let him.

John struck blindly now, each punch doing harm only to himself. By the time he’d finally tired himself out, he was shaking and pressed against Bruce’s front again, his pale fingers curled into the dense fabric covering his stomach. As he began to wilt to his knees, Bruce wrapped an arm around his waist and held him close. “I’m taking you to Arkham,” he said. “They can help you there.”

“No!” John wailed, eyes wild once more. Energy restored, he shoved Bruce away from him and sneered.

Bruce could barely stand to look at this monstrous stranger in front of him, not when he knew what laid beneath the surface of madness.

“I’m _not_ going back to that place. You—you don’t know what it’s _like_ there, Bruce!”

The tenseness hit with almost a palpable crackle, leaving them both in stunned silence that neither seemed to expect. Then, within seconds, John crumbled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I was thinking of somebody else. I’m sorry.”

_This_ was more like the John that Bruce knew, even if penitence was never quite the look for him. Something in him ached desperately to hold the man like he had before, but that would jeopardize everything, and he was walking on eggshells with this masked identity as it was. Slowly, he reached a hand out toward him, palm facing up. “I don’t know who you’re looking for, but I can see that you need some help. If you’ll let me, I can—”

“I’m _not_ going back,” John said, voice low and filled with something sinister that Bruce didn’t like.

“John, listen—”

That one little slip-up was all it took for John’s pupils to shrink, and he cast those wild green eyes on Bruce again, showing him a full-faced view of the monster behind them. “John—that’s, that’s not my… Why did you call me that?” He took a step toward Bruce, who, despite the façade he meant to erect, instinctively took one backward. “That isn’t my name,” John said with a crazy kind of laugh that made Bruce’s stomach churn. “That’s what _they_ called me. You’re one of _them,_ aren’t you?”

Bruce bit back all the responses welling on his tongue and instead took a deep breath through his nose. “John, I want to help you.”

To his surprise, John didn’t advance any further. He said nothing. He only frowned, eyes shifting to somewhere just past Bruce’s shoulder. Then, a second later, Bruce’s entire field of vision was filled with smoke, opaque and reeking of sulfur like the bank floor before. He jerked, but the desire to run escaped him for a second too long.

When Gordon raced up to the roof to meet him, gun drawn, Bruce was alone in the waning cloud of color, staring off at nothing and no one.

“Good god!” Gordon cried. “What happened, Batman? Where did he go?”

Bruce narrowed his eyes, and, without much focus paid to the cop, grumbled a succinct answer that only provided the obvious: “He got away.”

Somewhere out in the city there was a madman loose, and Bruce had a feeling that his dedication to his craft was going to be shaken to the core. Maybe not now, and maybe not soon, but _someday_ this was going to turn into something uglier than he could even imagine.

Someday, someday, someday.


End file.
